Justine Bourne currently of The Athletic and formerly the video coach of the Toronto Marlies sent twitter a blaze with this tweet.
If you expose a player in an expansion draft who scores 40 the next season you should auto-lose your job. I know player evaluation is hard but I don’t think most guys wouldn’t even be mad. “Yeah I know, I’m fired, that’s fair.…
— Justin Bourne (@jtbourne) March 19, 2018
This is obviously in reference to the Blue Jackets and William Karlsson. This is a situation I think most in Columbus are tired of hearing about. It’s great to see Karlsson have the success he is and it’s unfortunate he’s not doing this in Columbus, but no one at any point saw this coming. Many on Twitter came out and make this same point.
Chris Morehouse, Blue Jackets Director of Amateur Scouting, in a since deleted tweet replied to Bourne basically calling him out for not predicting this himself. This is why this whole thing is so frustrating. Looking at Karlsson’s body of work, both in the NHL and in his career in Sweden, he never once showed this kind of goal scoring upside. The most goals Karlsson had scored in a season was 20, back in 2010-11 in 38 games playing in the SuperElit.
W. Karlsson had logged ~2500 minutes in the NHL and racked up 55 points during that time. Unless there was some atrocious misuse of him in CBJ, don’t know how you can justify keeping him... https://t.co/cIWCwEZvw9
— EvolvingWild (@EvolvingWild) March 19, 2018
At the time of this decision the two players that were most talked about were Josh Anderson and Karlsson. Of the two I preferred letting Anderson go but not because I saw this coming from Karlsson, this was simply keep the centre over the winger. Others noted how the loss of Karlsson wasn’t going to be that significant.
I wrote about the expansion draft from the Blue Jackets perspective and how losing William Karlsson is probably not a big loss. https://t.co/mbh7m9K8LQ
— dom 🛩 (@domluszczyszyn) June 22, 2017
Karlsson is having a tremendous year but let’s not pretend this is sustainable in the long-rung.
I would argue that assuming a player with a career shooting percentage on the low end of things would just magically jump to a 23.8% - and protecting him over more proveable assets - is a much more common fireable offense. https://t.co/7y304SK5wH
— Catherine Silverman (@catmsilverman) March 19, 2018
The thread from Catherine Silverman is worth checking out. She makes a really point about how everyone from the Blue Jackets community is shocked by the season Karlsson is having. That should tell us something. Again the ones who followed Karlsson the closest, not one saw this breakout coming. If it was so easy for this to be predicted 29 other general managers missed the boat by not trading for Karlsson and keeping him for their own teams.
We need to stop faulting the Blue Jackets for this decision. No one saw this coming. I highly doubt anyone in the Vegas organization saw this season coming. Vegas definitely deserves some credit for expanding Karlsson’s role and giving him two skilled offensive wingers to play with. An opportunity he wasn’t going to get in Columbus.
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